In Yirun’s blogpost entitled (Prompt) Inclusive Design they brought up many good points about ways to make learning more interactive and thus make it more inclusive. Approaching the subject with five clear ways made the blog itself easy to follow and understandable. Out of the five ways the one that stood out to me the most was the concept of feedback. As an educator, one cannot assume that everything they do is perfect or correct. It’s of much more value to open up the value and directly hear from the people that someone is working with. This makes it so that educators can hear relevant and specific points on where they can improve and where they’re doing well so that proper consideration of how to be better can occur. In addition, having this open form of communication between students and teachers makes an environment more comfortable. It gives students a level of agency and control in how they are being taught, and helps them better explain what they need to succeed.
And then in Zihan’s blogpost also about Inclusive Design, they brought up great ideas on how to make lectures more engaging. Because we are currently in a time of online lectures, and only communicating through Zoom – it can be very hard to keep people engaged. When everything feels so distanced, how can we still make it still feel personal and fun? Zihan brought up using things such as flashcards and games to increase engagement, which I think makes a lot of sense because when students are just hearing something through their computer speakers it often goes in one ear and out the other. Using tools that test the learners and also help them enjoy class during this very abnormal time is a way to create connections even at a distance. And those connections are not only between learner and educator, but also among the different students. The loss of social connection for students is one of the most unfortunate byproducts of the pandemic, so finding ways to have young people talking and learning together is more relevant now than ever.
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